Two weeks notice
So how do you simultaneously make a whole lot of lip balm, find someone to take over the lip balm making and move out of your commercial space all at once?
Answer: you don’t. Well, at least I knew that I couldn’t juggle all of that at once.
And since having a production space is an important part of lip balm production, I made the most of it while I was still in there to stock up on inventory.
Timing it seemed, was on my side: the very last week of my big production run, I got word that a new tenant wanted the space.
Things in commercial real estate had moved sooooo slowly in my experience, so my jaw dropped when I was asked if the new folks could start accessing the space the next day, which happened to be April 1st. “Oh, did you mean May 1?” I said. No, they did not. They meant tomorrow.
I did not agree to tomorrow.
But I did agree to clear out in two weeks.
And that, my friends, was a whirlwind. Because when you’ve been running your business out of a commercial space for 7 years, you accumulate a lot of stuff. A lot of big stuff. Stuff that you do not want in your basement. Well, my basement anyways!
Luckily, one of my good friends who could win an olympic gold medal in selling stuff on marketplace (why is that not an olympic sport yet) offered to help me list and sell things, while I was furiously packing and trying to figure out where on earth I would keep the things we hadn’t managed to clear out by the deadline.
But there were a few things I wasn't sure I wanted to let go. Because, I mean, the plan was to find someone else to make the lip balm for me. But what if things didn’t go according to plan? Finding myself in a situation where I didn't have what I needed to make emergency lip balm was a big NO for me!
So I decided to hold on to a few essentials. Just in case. Because I'd rather do that than randomly wake up at 3am worried about not being able to make hypothetical emergency lip balm.
And so, at the end of those two weeks, all the physical items that remained from Eclair Lips moved to a 7x10 storage locker.
As I did the final walk-through of the commercial space, it was all so surreal.
That the business had moved there in the first place.
That a place that had felt like a second home to my family was now just a collection of big rooms echoing with the memories of a life from an alternate reality.
That barely 6 months after he left, I had already figured out so many things, and made it more than halfway through my plan.
Thank you for letting me share my story with you. Here are the other parts I've shared so far:
